Read an introduction to genetic engineering for nonscientists, posted by DNAPatent.com.

Read about stem cell research – science, news and policy – on the National Institutes of Health web site.

Read about The Bloodlines Project, Bloodlines: Technology Hits Home, which includes a one-hour PBS documentary, an interactive web site, outreach and a guide about how new life-sciences technologies are raising ethical, legal and social dilemmas as cutting-edge science intersects with the law. What does it mean to be a parent? To be human? To have rights? […]

Genome News Network posts articles on a range of bioethics topics; links to landmark documents, religious views and the U.S. government’s views on various issues; and a timeline on genetics and genomics. The Genome News Network is an educational web site affiliated with and editorially independent from the J. Craig Venter Institute.

The Project on Death in America seeks to transform the culture of dying by supporting initiatives in research, scholarship, the humanities and the arts, and by fostering innovation in the provision of care, public and professional education, and public policy. It is a major funder of research on death, dying and palliative care.

Pact is a national nonprofit that provides education and adoption service to children of color, their birth parents and their adoptive parents. Beth Hall is the founder and executive director.

The Child Welfare League of America in Arlington, Va., is a coalition of hundreds of private and public member agencies and a leader in the national child welfare movement, beginning with efforts to abolish orphanages in the 1920s and ’30s. The organization also is a center for information about cultural and racial diversity, including efforts […]

The U.S. Children’s Bureau was a federal investigative agency created by Congress in 1912, as an outgrowth of national campaigns to reduce infant mortality and child labor and of baby-farming and black-market adoption scandals. It advocated standards in placement and state adoption laws, and it held the first conferences on child welfare. Today the organization […]

Elizabeth Samuels is a professor at the University Baltimore School of Law. Her areas of expertise include child and family law/adoption, constitutional law and Supreme Court seminar.